Proposals are warmly invited on the general conference theme: exploring'intertextuality' in all its forms in Irish literature and culture. Pleasesubmit a title and 200 word abstract to irish_at_unsw.edu.au by 15th December,2005. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes duration.

In writing The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, EdnaLongley says that she found she was often 'tracing a textual web', and thatthe term 'intertextuality' applied to what she was investigating 'not as atheoretical dead letter, but as a creative dynamic working upon mechanismsof tradition and cultural definitions alike'.

This conference is devoted to exploring 'intertextuality' in all its formsin Irish literature and culture from earliest times to the present.

The creative dynamic that Edna Longley detects is of course even at work inher own formulation with its echoes of Eliot's "Tradition and the IndividualTalent", Barthes' "The Death of the Author", and Yeats's "Easter 1916".

And it seems equally true of critic as of creator, though Wilde hasbrilliantly collapsed that distinction.

Others use different metaphors. W.H. Auden writes of his awareness of'ghostly presences'; Harold Bloom of 'the anxiety of influence'; RichardEllmann of 'eminent domain'; M.H. Abrams of exploring 'serviceableanalogues, whose properties were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of awork of art'; Edna Longley of a 'dispersed collectivity' that is the domainof 'intertextual antagonism'; Seamus Heaney of 'overhearing'; and T.S. Eliotof his belief that 'between the true artists of any one time there is S anunconscious community'.

Not that such 'influences', 'exchanges', 'transactions', 'borrowings' or'intertextualities'-or whatever one wants to call them-are always as benignas inferred by 'community' or as organic as implied by begetting. They mightcontaminate, distort, or perhaps render stereotypical.

But if such processes are as powerful and as pervasive as writers andcritics claim, shouldn't we enquire into how they function? and shouldn't weask what are the implications for Irish Studies-particularly about the wayswe research and teach?

IASIL 2006, which will meet in Sydney from Thursday 20 July to Sunday 23July inclusive, has committed itself to exploring, explicating and enjoyingthe 'textual web' that is Irish Studies.